Author : Abubakar Surajo Imam and Robert Bicker

This paper presents a comprehensive development of a flight control software to facilitate autonomous and semi-autonomous control of a quadrotor. The software system consists of two parts, namely, the on-board flight control software and the user control interface. The software systems for the quadrotor perform tasks such as (i) hardware driving, (ii) input-output control law implementation, (iii) device-operation management, (iv) multiple-task scheduling, and (v) event management. The on-board flight control software is developed using a graphical programming software integrated development environment (IDE), namely Flowcode, developed by Matrix Multimedia. A behaviour-based architecture was adopted in the design of the autonomous flight control software, in which the operation of the quadrotor is organized in a variety of behaviours. A hierarchical and modularized structure is used to execute these behaviours and to integrate multiple control algorithms. The user control interface software was developed using the Processing language, and runs on Windows-based PC. The user control interface is equipped with a wireless modem for communicating with the on-board software system. The performance of the quadrotor flight control software was implemented, and a satisfactory result was obtained.

Keywords: Quadrotor, Flight Control Software, Graphical Use Control Interface, Flowcode, Processing Language.

Article published in International Journal of Current  Engineering  and Technology, Vol.4,No.1 (Feb- 2014)